Various types of online multimedia presentations are known including webcasts and web-conferences. A webcast is an online presentation that includes and audio or video component that is delivered over the internet. A web-conference is an online presentation that may include a telephone-based audio/video component, but also includes a standard internet-based audio or video stream such as delivered by Quicktime, Real, or Windows Media Servers.
One of the primary problems associated with online presentations is the desire to add “metadata” into the online presentation. The addition of the “metadata” makes the experience feature rich and compelling and adds interactivity to what would otherwise be accomplished in a more static manner by just reading a text file or listening to a recording. To be more specific, one of the primary functions of online webcasts and web conferences is the ability to present a sequence of “slides” extracted from a Microsoft PowerPoint document, and to be able to add interactive elements to it. The technique most commonly used to address this problem is to require manual entry of the metadata into a data-repository, typically a database, using client software that may web-based, or may require installing a software package. It is desirable to have a system that automatically extracts the metadata from a file, such as a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Thus it is desirable to provide a webcast metadata extraction system and method and it is to this end that the present invention is directed.